When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. – Luke 10:5-6

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 20, 2017): Luke 10

To be considered a people of peace, peace must be our priority. Even more than that, peace must be our first action. I believe that Christians are to be a people of peace. But, to our shame, other faiths often seem to be much better at promoting peace than Christians. And the problem is that peace is neither our priority nor our first action. Peace is simply our response, sometimes, to peace. But more often than not our priority is to preserve a particular way of life – even if we have to accomplish that through the use of violence. There are so many things that I do not understand about the contemporary Jesus movement. I have no idea how the Christian Church has become more related to war than peace. From the point of view of the world, Christians are warmongers. For some, there is a belief that there is no path to peace as long as we are present. But that was never the ideal set before us by the founder of our movement, Jesus Christ. I have no idea how the “right to life” protestors, most of whom seem to have a Christian outlook if not a Christian lifestyle, think it is okay to take the life of those on the other side of the debate. The lives of the abortion clinic employees and mothers considering abortion as a response to an unwanted pregnancy are just as important as the life of the baby that we are trying to save. If we are faithful to our belief system, peace and love can be our only response to the violence that is continually present in that world.

As Jesus prepares his disciples to go out and spread his message without him, his instructions are about peace. When you enter a house, first say ‘Peace to this house.’ If a person of peace dwells in that house, then peace will reign – in fact, peace will be multiplied. But if there is not a person of peace that dwells in that house, then peace would return to them. Absolutely nothing would be lost. It costs zero to offer peace first. And a person of peace never loses peace when peace is rejected. We just try to offer peace again. Noticeably absent from Jesus instructions is any mention of sanctions or punishment that should be poured out on the house that lacked a person of peace. Just allow peace to come back to you and rest on you as you move on to another house.

It might be that Jesus’s words here are a reaction to James and John’s suggestion that Jesus’s followers should be allowed to “call down fire from heaven to destroy” anyone who threatened the Jesus movement (Luke 9:54). Then Jesus rebuked his disciples for thinking in that way, here he goes a step further and instructs them positively to be a people of peace, offering peace wherever they go, even in the face of opposition and violence.

We are still called to be a people of peace whose only priority is to offer peace. If peace is rejected, there is still no reason to react with violence, just move on repeat the process. When peace becomes a core part of who we are, we will never lose it, and we will always agree with the teachings of Jesus.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: John 7